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Recently, the Hospitality Technology "Technical Research Report for Hotel Industry 2020" sponsored by ShiCheck Group subsidiary MyCheck was officially released.

This report collects the most representative hotels in the hotel industry, thinking about hotel technology investment and forecasting, and clarifying the direction for hoteliers' technology investment in the new year.

As we have seen, today, the rapid development of technology is testing the initiative of hoteliers. But compared to last year, hoteliers seem to be more cautious about investing in the 2020 IT budget.

They will evaluate the necessity of investment based on three key indicators: whether it is purposeful; whether it is forward-looking and whether it can increase profits.

1. Business-driven hotel IT budget continues to grow

Technological innovation is constantly evolving, and hotel IT budgets are stagnant. This is a common problem faced by most hotels.

In 2020, hotel IT budgets did not achieve the growth expected in 2019. The report shows that in 2019, the technical expenditure for hotel system maintenance accounted for 54%, and the IT budget itself was facing multiple pressures, which was greatly restricted.

Although the economic situation in early 2020 has brought hotel development into an unstable period, they still plan to increase their IT budget in 2020. Among them, the urgent need for digitization, automation and replacement of legacy systems is the main driving force for increasing IT budgets in 2020.

2. Data security is more included in the scope of technical strategy considerations

The lack of sufficient budgets for technical plans and projects has been the biggest challenge for hoteliers to implement technology strategies for the fourth consecutive year. Regardless of plans and budgets, this year's hotel industry has focused more on data security.

The report shows that nearly 40% of respondents regard "enhancing payment and data security" as the most important strategic goal. The security and privacy issues brought about by the adoption of new technologies are listed as the second biggest obstacle to technology strategy.

Although the data collected in previous years shows that the hotel industry has made great progress in payment and data security, it is clear that endless news reports about data breaches still disturb hotel executives. Privacy regulations and compliance regulations, as well as Windows 7 end-of-life and security issues, are also issues that the hotel industry has been paying attention to.

Three of the top five hotel software investments are related to data management.

In terms of investment in compliant monitoring software, 44% of respondents said that they have increased or upgraded / replaced their suppliers for the first time. In addition, employee safety (emergency button) is the first major increase in hotels for the first time, accounting for 19% of the hotels surveyed.

3. Upgrade guest experience with the help of cloud technology and modern technology

In order to increase profits, hotels need a lot of data and detailed labels to help them tap new sources of revenue. The local system and the legacy system have certain data barriers in terms of data aggregation, so in this process, the migration of the system to the cloud is crucial for hotels.

Since 2017, the hotel ’s cloud-based system has gradually developed. It is worth noting that in 2017, only 34% of hotel CRS was migrated to the cloud, and in 2020, this number rose to 62%.

In addition, according to Hospitality Technology's "2019 Customer Participation Technology Research Report", 72% of guests are more likely to choose hotels that can meet their technical needs again. In 2020, the respondents are most concerned about hotel technology are instant messaging (45%), mobile payment (44%), public Wi-Fi (36%), chatbots (36%) and mobile applications (36%) .

In order to keep up with the expectations of digital guests, hotels have begun to gradually increase their focus on artificial intelligence technology, and 72% of hoteliers believe that artificial intelligence will produce tremendous benefits in providing services and marketing for future guests.

4. Solve payment challenges and keep innovating

To ensure data security and get favor from guests, solving payment is a crucial part.

However, due to the constraints of the current system diversification and other factors, the hotel's widespread adoption of payment methods has been greatly limited. Based on the characteristics of the payment and hospitality industry, Shilo Group subsidiary MyCheck CEO Shlomit Kugler believes that the key to promoting payment reform is integration.

Under an independent terminal, it is not difficult to achieve partial integration. But in order to achieve a real increase in the efficiency of employees in the payment link, it is necessary to ensure that integration does not affect the daily work of employees. Therefore, in this process, standardized APIs are crucial.

Kugler also mentioned that in 2020, Europe will introduce a new regulation called "Strong Customer Certification" (SCA) to ensure the safety of users' transactions. However, the complicated transaction verification process prescribed by the regulations will greatly affect the user experience. Then, the hotel needs to have multiple alternative transaction methods to provide guests with a faster and smoother settlement experience, which can make guests no longer subject to the strong authentication process when paying again, and truly make the one-click payment experience possible.